http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rfl6CQX71i4
My advance degree work includes Masters in Psychology with a
concentration in addiction counseling, alcohol addiction. The field is so pitiful that if I recall the
numbers correctly, without a good addiction
program and alcoholic runs the likelihood of a about 5% chance of recovering on
their own, and with a good addiction program that goes up to about 7%, which is
almost statistically irrelevant, statistically insignificant.
My point is that psychology is something that I know little
bit about, and I'm read deeply at the PhD level.
When's the best time to cure an alcoholic that every night
is beating his wife and children?
Now. Right? When would the sane alcoholic, the recovered
alcoholic wish that they had been cured?
Now, right? Same answer. The 2
million species that our children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren
were to inherit are going extinct at a rate that no one can pin down - the
ranges that I've seen are between 25 and 250 per day. Our progeny, when would they have wanted us
to stop the extinction? Now. Right? So said Severn Suzuki, a young teen, to the UN
decades ago. Must see - right side of
Tracking Plan B blog. At our current
rate of needless emissions it's a near certainty that sea levels will rise six
feet by century's end. 20 to 30% of the country's
wealth, United States, well it's in our sea-level cities, Houston, Tampa,
Miami, Fort Lauderdale, the southern third of Florida, New York, Boston,
Washington DC, San Francisco…. Every
inch rise, every foot rise that we allow by delaying one more year the
reduction of warming gas emissions, is hundreds of billions or trillions of
dollars that our children will have to earn and spend to keep those sea-level
cities from being destroyed. When will
your child have wished that we'd stopped the global warming emissions? Now, right?
Using entirely needless climate Armageddon as the immediate
example of mass insanity, is it not that an example of mass insanity? Is it not likely that 70 to 90% of US
citizens, 5 to 10 years after the sane policy of simply transferring the
wreckage costs to those who are doing the emissions, same way we transferred
cigarette health costs to the smokers, will not 70, 80, 90% of Americans 10
years after that legislation is passed, look back and say, 'my God, why did we
wait so long? My God why wasn't I on the
Vanguard of that? This was crazy.’ Is that not what happened within 10 years of
the legislation that gave women the right to vote - 'My God, that was crazy, we
were treating our daughters as citizens that didn't deserve the right to
vote? Is that not what happened with
slavery, maybe a bit slower? It's
certainly what happened with civil rights legislation. It wasn't a decade before most Americans,
before they were saying – ‘that was crazy how we treated people that are black. We allow people to be lynched? We allowed people to be in 'whites only'
waiting rooms? Yes of course, lunatics
are still around, my brothers and sisters all, they'll always be around. The exception proves the rule.
So here's the point. Less
than any other essays in either of the two books published these last two
months, less than any other of these essays, am I able to point to the fairly explicit
references from our great Unviolent warriors of the past, that they too view
this as a sanity problem. Though it is
certain in my mind that they would totally agree with this framing. I don't think it's coincidental that King
most frequently cited the psychologist in whom I have the most regard, Alfred
Adler, indicating a healthy interest in psychology on Dr. King's part. It's clear to me that the man Jesus, be he,
flesh and blood or a collage of ideas, doesn't matter to me, although scholars,
the secular scholars are sure that he existed as a man, taught as a man. It's clear to me that Jesus is the greatest
psychologist that ever lived, grasping, living and teaching the truth of the
DNA given aspects of our psychology better than anyone ever has - How to find a joyful life using the
machinery, the bio machinery, that we've been given to inhabit, and reducing
the likelihood of exterminating ourselves in the process.
As with this whole book you get to reject it, you get to not
read it, but it's clear to me that
Gandhi, King, Jesus, Alice Paul...
Understood our humanity, understood our psychology. At an intuitive level they understood this
better than anyone. And even if they
didn't articulate it this way, what they were giving their life for was to be a
mass cure to mass insanity. And whether
or not that was their plan, that's what the masses of populations liberated by
them said of themselves. 'That was
crazy; we enslaved people? I was
crazy?' 'We had mass child labor? That was crazy? We let Mubarak brutally dictate to us for 30
years in Egypt? That was crazy?' 'We had apartheid in South Africa?' 'That was crazy.' The masses of people from their hearts
articulate this.
So when is the best time to cure a mass disease? Now.
When is the best time to cure a mass insanity? Now.
When is the time that those who will look back 10, 20 years from now
will wish we had ended the mass insanity of exterminating the world's species,
and thereby impoverishing our children's future forever, killing the oceans,
killing half of their rivers, finishing
the complete plunder of all fossil fuels and God knows what those might be
needed for 100 200 300 years from now.
Dooming all future humans to untold economic slavery to try and repair
what we can easily correct today.
When is the right time to stop our insanity?
What if we don't do it on our first shot? What if it takes a second, third, or fourth
attempt and those are spread over numerous years? When will we wish we tried the first time to
begin to accelerate our learning on how difficult would be? Now.
Right?
That's the theory on which the death fast, and all of, in
this author's assessment, all of the great Unviolent warriors stood. They were not trying to force something that
ultimately the populace would find unacceptable. They were seeing that there was mass
insanity, and on the other side of what they were trying to bring about, was a
relief, a gratitude, a sense of health, a sense of progress. That's what this is all about friend.
And what right do we have to leave the masses of our
brothers and sisters in the distress, in the agony with the ever increasing
number of victims of their uncured disease?
We have an obligation to attempt that cure with everything we have and
everything we are, a moral obligation to
try. And the theory on which we do so is
that when one is cured of disease, of the crack addiction, of an alcohol
addiction, of addiction to stuff, Affloholism, which is our mass addiction
today - One indication that it was a disease is the relief and gratitude of the
cured client.
Let's get on with it.
No comments:
Post a Comment